SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher. “Pulp Politics.” New York Review of Books XLIII, no. 4 (29 February 1996): 23–28.

In the following favorable review, Hitchens places Primary Colors within the context of two other politically-based novels—Jeff Greenfield's The People's Choice and Jim Lehrer's The Last Debate.

In 1971, Jerry Bruno and Jeff Greenfield jointly wrote a book called The Advance Man. Bruno had been “advance man” for the John F. Kennedy campaign when the techniques of spin and momentum were in their relative infancy, and Greenfield had performed something of the same office for the Robert Kennedy campaign in 1968. (Bruno had also been the “advance man” for the presidential trip to Dallas in November of 1963, and in this memoir he vividly described the atmosphere of hate and venom in that city, rightly locating it not on the Birchite fringe but in the pitiless conflict between the Connally and Yarborough wings of the Texas Democratic...